Why Does Getting Close to Someone Make Me Want to Leave? Understanding Feelings of Engulfment in Relationships. How Can Therapy Help?
Too close, or too far away, we have to be found
I am reminded of the importance of natural emergence. When a butterfly breaks its way out of its chrysalis, the challenging experience shapes its wings, allowing the butterfly to become independent in its flight. As we develop, we learn an ingrained sense of what relationships feel like to us. Take a moment to get in touch with this, think of yourself as very young for a moment. In this young place, we are vulnerable to our caregivers' way of relating to us, for better or worse. We are shaped in the mood, attitude and style of how they feel able to meet us. If this care feels too close, or too far away, or if we have to comply or protest to get love - this experience remains in us, like a blueprint for our future relational life.
Engulfment
There are some of us, as adults, that feel a haunting sense of being trapped after we commit to get closer to another person. As intimacy develops, it can start to feel like distance, but we are still within the closeness of intimacy. It can start to feel like we are being trapped. Life can start to lose its vitality and vividness. It can feel like we have fewer choices. We can lose a sense of ourselves, and our freedom. This constricting doubt can be a very distressing and confusing experience for many people. It can leave us feeling afraid and lost in a place where we believe we should be finding love, hope, support, and peace. In seeking to cope, many people experience a flip flop, or boomerang style of attachment during acute feelings of engulfment. Sometimes, there is a need to manage the intensity of staying in the relationship by discharging a variety of feelings or fantasies about leaving.
At the tipping point, a conviction that the relationship is wrong is replaced by another conviction that it is the right relationship afterall. When this unfolds, there are often moments when a feeling of relief washes over the person. Not too dissimilar to the feeling after physical exertion is released, a warm ‘flowing away’ of tension. This feeling of relief is often mistaken for love. There is a seamless fold between this ending of the cycle and the subtle beginning of the next, that slowly starts to move the person towards thinking and feeling that again they are in the wrong relationship. This can repeat many times and as the repetitions mount, the events begin to produce their own debris; harm to both people and the accumulated shame that becomes corrosive. The toxic shame then becomes impossible to separate and is sometimes deeply identified with as an echo of early developmental life, this suffering weighs down the person further.
When someone comes to therapy and shares this type of experience, it is almost always in a mire of confusion and doubt - who, or what, has caused this, and how can I avoid it ever happening again? Is this what love is meant to feel like?
Attachment - What love feels like?
John Bowlby's Attachment theory informs us that early bonding experiences with the people that cared closely for us, shape our internal templates of how relationships should feel and form between ourselves and people that we develop intimate connections with. He called these our ‘internal working models’ of attachment. These ‘models’, in many ways, inform us in how we relate to the experience of life itself, as almost everything is a form of relational experience. So, this speaks to the very stance we take in the world as people. This stance is a potential in our psyche before we meet the person that brings the ‘other half’ for us to entangle our dynamics and history with. Hopefully this might be received as something that is stabilising to hear; there is hope. However, like any therapy, there is some form of difficulty involved because, afterall, strain, or some form of tension, is needed. Carl Jung believed that strain allows us to trigger change in ourselves. In our psychological world. And this, ironically, is what will set off one’s attachment system.
When we learnt what relationships meant, for better or worse, we also learnt a blueprint for how to get close to people and what to expect.
To whom are we relating?
When we are building a relationship there will be a point, a depth, where our pattern of attachment begins to come online - but who in our internal world are we in touch with from the past, that is influencing our relationship now, in the present?
There are many possible answers to this, and this is where an experience in therapy can really support in building our awareness of the difficulty that we are facing, and begin to take responsibility for it, without attacking the other, or defending ourselves. To remain conscious and willing to feel the sometimes awful and deadening feelings. To touch the attachment inheritance from our early life. There is sometimes a point when this becomes too much to bear. At this point, other people, often those that are known only by a fragment, become deeply enthralling and alluring to us as we seek to stabilise our feelings with a shot of novelty and excitement. This however, does not really change anything in the long term. It only keeps alive the fantasy that there is someone ‘out there’ that can save us from ourselves ‘in here’. Effectively, we seek redemption from the experience of our own hearts.
Can’t change the past, but could change the relationship to it
If you are still here, this speaks to a willingness to stay with the process despite not knowing how, or if, it will be worthwhile, illuminating, or successful. This is exactly the type of reality and connected ground that we need to walk, to get used to, in order to disconnect from the powerful, and sometimes magical quality of the fantasies that deep love can exist without pain and heartache. That the ride can be smooth. That, finally, you will find them and it will be just like you were promised.
We cannot hope beyond the relationships we know, without being willing to accept some risk, uncertainty or doubt. These are the feelings that engulfment experiences trigger. Weathering them, in service of a real, and at times, inevitably flawed relationship is a fundamental difference; not using fantasies to soothe our pain at being absent of heart in an unreal feeling relationship.
Straining to fly
When we seek to shift the way we attach, and in turn, the ongoing experience of our relationships, we need to work with the difficulty that arises in the context of our deep bonding. Just as the butterfly seeks to physically struggle out of its casing and hang upside down. We need to strain against our attachment dilemma in order to gain independence from it. This difficult process is what forces fluid into the butterfly's wings to expand them for flight. It’s what allows us to experience our feelings of fear, anguish, terror or deadness. When we seek to escape the chrysalis early, we risk not being able to fly, we risk short circuiting our ability to grow beyond what is ingrained.
Therapy
Thomas Moore writes that often we bring a naive psychological attitude to our everyday lives - that indeed our lives and relationships will be simple. Working in a psychotherapeutic relationship is one of the ways that we can support a process of love for the complexity of life and relationship. To seek to strain in a meaningful way. To generously give a new understanding and meaning to familiar aspects of ourselves and to the having of relationships. With people who have experienced engulfment, it can mean taking slow and conscious steps towards closeness with a therapist - who knows from training and experience the unfolding of what their own attachment system is doing, and is likely to do in closeness. Closeness in this sense, is specifically an emotionally driven bond in which anxieties and fears can be voiced and worked through. This is sometimes very challenging, and as understood by this article - essentially the work of meaningful change itself. It may be necessary to stretch the heart wide enough to embrace love.
